Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  The next day he had showed the telegram to Libby. She had begun to make a scene over something (oh yes, he never listened to her any more—which he didn’t), and he had only pulled it from his pocket and tossed it on the table so as to alter the course of events. “Here! This is why I’m preoccupied. Sure, I’m preoccupied—here, read this!” “Oh Paul,” said Libby, reading, “what are we going to do?” “We’ll do what we have to do—what I have to—”

  Duty! Screw duty! Feeling! Aren’t you a student of letters? A teacher of Dostoevsky? Puller of long faces, booster of The Brothers K? Enemy of Spigliano and the legions of reason? Are you not a writer of prose fiction, all heartfelt? No! Are you not the high priest of love? No! Were you ever? No! No! What an idea of himself he had constructed! What an impossible idea!

  “Let me tell you what I’m going to do, Libby—nothing! I’m under no obligation, absolutely none. Well, what do you think? What are you crying about now?”

  “Oh,” she wept, “you have no—”

  From time to time he had to do what he did then. “I’ve got feelings!” he roared, having smacked her. “I’ve got feelings that tell me he could live without me, so he can die without me too!”

  With the red mark on her pale cheek, she cried less, not more, which was why, having hit her that first time some years back, he had come to do it again: it worked. In their six years he had not indulged himself on more than four or five occasions. He did not quite know what to make of this set of facts—divide five into six and compare to the national average? To get what? How was he to measure her assault upon him? Didn’t he get a handicap because she had turned out to be a weakling? What about her handicap?

  As had happened on the four or five previous occasions, he was now filled with remorse. Libby was sitting with her coffee cup, leafing through her Jewish homemaker’s book; she wasn’t crying, just deadly silent. “What are you looking up?” he asked softly, “a name? Does it give a list of names?” She nodded; three fingers still showed on her cheek; now two; now one.

  “Well, which do you like?” Now, thank God, none. “What do you like, Lib?”

  “What about Nahum?”

  “For a boy,” he asked, “or a girl?”

  “A boy.” She did more than answer—she smiled. Oh I’m coming back into her good graces. I need your good graces, oh yes I do, Libby. “It means comfort,” she said.

  “Well, sure, Lib, if you like it. Nahum Herz? Does that sound, I don’t know, perfect to you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well it’s nice, honey,” he said skeptically. “I suppose it’s a nice old name—”

  “If your father dies, do we have to name it after your father?”

  “We don’t have to do anything, Libby.”

  “I thought you might want to.”

  There! How many points does she get for that? He rose from the table; she was incurably—what, stupid or destructive, naïve or mean? “Libby, I want him to die! He should die, if there’s any justice in this world. He’s ruined our life!” But shame came in, like a rolling of waves, and carried with it the truth: I ruined it. Me.

  The following day he went to see Spigliano and told him he had to go East for a few days. He waited for Spigliano to ask why. “My father’s dying,” answered Paul gravely. Oh gravity! What a lie. I am a man of feeling, Spigliano, and you are not. I am at one with old Fyodor and you are—Bullshit. I am you.

  And that evening, at the end of the third day, he had boarded the overnight coach to New York; why, he was not certain, though the blackness of Ohio—they were moving again, heads lolling on the seats around him—and the rushing of the train, the telegram in his pocket, the knowledge of what he had left behind, the uncertainty of what he was moving into, all produced in him now a sense of the profundity of the moment. But what? How? Why was he allowing himself to be borne through space at a rapid rate on a dark night? To where?

  In the morning the dawn began to lift just outside of Philadelphia. He made his way down the car to the washroom, and when he came back to his seat it was becoming day. It was as though the sky and sun held fast while the earth spun out of its darkness into light. And then he realized that this was exactly what happened. All and everything. The thought made his eyes swell. All that was natural and simple in life reduced him to tears. The dawn … Love … Libby …

  Only when he stepped off the train in New York, dragging his bag after him, did he understand his journey. He had left his wife.

  In the station he went into the coffee bar. It was nine o’clock in New York, eight in Chicago. Was she up? Sleeping? Dead? He rejected the idea, not only that Libby might be dead (wish fulfillment? no, just the old business, just guilt) but that he had left her. But the two seemed somehow to fit together: if he had not left her, then she couldn’t be anything but living and breathing. Christ, was he trapped! It didn’t even give him comfort to realize he was being irrational. He took his change in dimes and went to the phone booth; inside he sat fingering the coins. If he hadn’t left Libby, it must be that he really had come East to see his father, to soothe his mother. So he made up his mind and called Brooklyn. (As he dialed he saw Libby stirring in their bed—yes, alive and breathing.) He allowed the phone to ring ten times, then an eleventh, and then—breathless—a twelfth. Then he hung up—bang! Twelve long rings because he was a dutiful man, a good son.

  Good son? Dope! Jerk! Weakling! Where’s your courage?

  He remained seated in the phone booth and found some serenity in thinking that no one except Libby knew he was in New York. He might as well be anywhere. It was the first time in six years that he had been separated from his wife. This morning he had awakened—or met the day, at any rate—without first having to feel, accidentally or on purpose, anybody’s hands, feet, or hair, without having to worry first thing in the morning about somebody else’s feelings. Five and a half years of it. Outside the booth, at nine A.M., there was no one he knew; nobody who passed paid him any attention. Every few minutes he heard announced the departure of another train for another part of the East. He had only to climb aboard and get off in Wilmington, Baltimore, or Miami Beach. Washington … get a little room somewhere, get a job in some government office, and disappear. Start making a life not on the basis of what he dreamed he was, or thought he was supposed to be, or what literature, philosophy, friends, enemies, wife, parents told him he must be, but simply in terms of his own possibilities.

  Picking up his suitcase (the new life would be begun simply: one suit, one sport jacket, two shirts, and three pairs of underwear) he left the booth. But in the midst of the crowds pushing toward the tracks, he seemed not to be gaining anonymity but losing it; and so the only train he took that morning was the BMT, and where it carried him was back to the place where he had been born.

  There is no need to chronicle Paul Herz’s feelings as he left the subway and walked the three blocks to the Liverpool Arms. He was anybody returning home. It was June in Brooklyn, and he had lived seventeen Junes in Brooklyn before he had gone off to college and a wife. Nothing was unfamiliar to his eyes. The elevator smelled like the inside of a tin can, and the corridors smelled milky—no change there either. Upstairs the same door was hinged on their apartment; under his feet was the same doormat. At the age of eleven Paul had cut a sliver from one of his father’s business cards with an old razor blade and Scotch-taped it above the doorbell: his father’s name. He had imagined at the time that it would give his saddened old man a little lift, for Mr. Herz had just gone under for the third time—real estate. That little sliver was still there above the bell, and considering what the sight of it did to Paul’s insides, he knew the apartment itself would be too much. She would make unfair claims. Paul, look at this photo—remember the picnics? Remember Uncle Nathan who died, such a young man and the only one on your father’s side with the benefits of a college education? Paulie, Sheepshead Bay, look. You ate shrimps till they came out of your ears, you and Maury, remember? And your stamps, no one has
touched a single page, and your rocks and your butterflies and your baseball glove and your report cards, still framed—oh Paul, how could you do this to your parents, a boy who got such perfect grades in Conduct—

  He rang the bell for two reasons. First, if it was not for his parents’ sake that he had come East, then it was for something else, and he did not want to think about that right now. (Though he could not help himself really: if he had actually left Libby, then she must be dead. Ridiculous. She was awake now in Chicago—then he had not left her. This was ridiculous reasoning!) Secondly, he rang because, having telephoned earlier, he was pretty sure no one was home. He rang again and again. Then there was only one more thing to do. He turned the door handle; to his relief he found that it was locked. He began to breathe again. Imagine having to sit in that club chair in the living room, one hand on either doily, waiting for his mother to come home. So what now? Where? Suitcase in hand, he moved past all the empty milk and sour-cream bottles to the elevator. Where? Anywhere. Start again. Last chance. Once there’s a baby it’s all over. To go back and become not just a husband but a father too—well, that would be that. If it had taken five and a half years to walk out on his Libby, it would take forever with some little Nahum sleeping in the other room. He got in the elevator and traveled down to the main floor. His body actually shook at the thought that if he wanted to he need no longer have any connection to anybody. Consequently he did not even leave the elevator but pushed the button marked 6 and rose once again.

  “My God—Paul!”

  Doris had on a gay floral apron over her slacks. Inside, instead of old lady Horvitz’s oriental rugs, there was blue carpeting as far as the eye could see; instead of the meaty odor that used to waft out from the kitchen when Maury’s parents were fattening their son up in this same apartment, there now floated out the pungent, domestic smell of coffee. Things had changed—everything but Doris, who seemed as stunned at seeing him as he was upon seeing her. Everyone has someone upon whose flesh and bones his first discoveries were made. Paul had had Doris; Doris, Paul. Yes, all the inconsequentiality and fervor of their passion came back to him … Doris still slouched in the shoulders and he had the old impulse to tell her to straighten up and be beautiful. But she was Maury’s wife now, ten years older, and the mistress of all that carpeting. “Hello, Doris. I wondered—I was looking for my mother.”

  “Oh Paul. She’s at the hospital. Maury just drove her over a few minutes ago. Paul, it’s you.”

  “I called downstairs and she wasn’t home.”

  “She’s been living here since it happened.”

  Ah, it. Not the heart attack. Never the plane crash or the cancer or the bankruptcy. The it. The tsura one couldn’t even mention.

  He was home.

  He looked at Doris’s familiar face, and suddenly he remembered distinctly her father’s voice calling out from the bedroom into the darkened living room, where the two of them had sat panting: “Doris, is that you, dolly? Is somebody with you? Tell him thank you, dolly, and tell him it’s the next day already, your father has to get up and go to work soon, tell him thank you and good night, dolly—”

  “How is he?” Paul asked, and waited to hear that it had killed his own father, that the old man’s last failure was history.

  “I guess,” said Doris, shrugging, “I guess he’s coming along. What can we expect? He’s in a terrific coma. You got Maurie’s telegram?”

  He stood in the old hallway (waiting for Maury to finish his malted milk, waiting for Maury to finish his clarinet lesson) and was aware that somebody now knew he was in New York. All his circumstances, past and present, settled down over him. He saw Libby in the bathroom in Chicago squeezing toothpaste onto her brush. “I got the telegram,” he said, and followed Doris into the apartment. “I can only stay a minute,” he added.

  “Just a cup of coffee. Just sit down. Paul,” she said, “it’s good to see you.”

  They came into the living room, which was nothing like the old days when every object had its coverlet, the sofa its antimacassars, the piano its Spanish shawl, the satin lamp shades their little plastic dustproof wrappings. The room now was airy and modern, all pastel shades; with no heavy drapings falling across the windows, light blazed into every corner. Avocados and gardenias flourished as though they were outdoors. There was a playpen near the window, toys all around, and in conspicuous places photographs of Maury, Doris, and a baby.

  “You have a child?” Paul asked.

  “Two. Jeff is in nursery school. Michael’s in his crib having his bottle. Two boys—”

  Before she could ask if he wanted to see Michael in his crib having his bottle, he said, “I better not stay too long, Doris.”

  “You look so tired.”

  “Traveling.” He remained standing. “How’s Maury?”

  “He’s doing wonderful—and he talks about you, Paul. He really does. We have whole conversations about you.” The tinge that rose on her neck and cheeks revealed a little of the nature and spirit of those conversations. “Why don’t you put down your luggage?” she suggested.

  “You’re looking fine, Doris, too—”

  “Do I look the same?”

  “Except for your hair. You wear that differently.”

  “Sure, well, I cut it. Not just me, everybody’s wearing it short. Sit down, all right? Put down your suitcase, you make me tired standing there holding it. You like espresso? We even drink it for breakfast. You ought to see your mother drowning it with cream and sugar. You want that or you want instant?”

  He decided—her silly talkativeness decided for him—to stay for a little coffee. “Either is all right.”

  “Sit down.”

  He released his suitcase with an unconscious sigh, and they smiled at one another.

  “Oh Paul,” she called from the kitchen, “it’s so wonda-ful to see you.”

  Could it be? He had taken off his coat and had sat down in a chair with beautiful wooden arms; he stretched out his legs. Oh, it felt good. He even closed his eyes, even had a pure moment of thoughtlessness—his mind ceased searching out the next five minutes. Was it possible that he was happy? Had his crisis passed? Without even knowing it, had he come to some decision? Or was it only Doris and the sweet familiarity of her vowels and diphthongs? Wonda-ful, mahvelous, you could caay faaaw me—she was humming in the kitchen. What a good-natured girl. What a pliable simple girl. Dolly, tell him thank you and tell him good night—Wonda-ful …

  So was Elizabeth DeWitt Herz pliable. So was Libby simple—oh yes, simple! And there went his happiness and his thoughtless moment. He sat straight up, taking in the facts of Maury’s prosperity and success. Actually it didn’t seem to have been happiness he had been experiencing anyway—just relief at Doris’s not hating him. As if what Doris Horvitz did or did not feel made any significant difference in his life. He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. She is having breakfast alone. Isn’t she better off? He wanted to shout right through to where he saw her sitting bent over the table, in that blue flannel bathrobe with the white piping, buttering her toast. And—oh, no, no, not crying? Libby, baby, what are you crying over now? Oh dumbbell, look, get up, get dressed, put on that new yellow jumper and get out. Take a nice long walk, the Midway is green, the lake is blue, it’s spring, Libby, take a train to the Loop, have lunch, go to Stouffer’s with all the ladies, go to Field’s, shop, live. Libby, you’re alone, you see, without worries, without cares—see how wonda-ful it can be? Free, Libby! Free, young, still pretty, and in Field’s ten men will smile at that face of yours—maybe, who knows, Wallach himself—

  No. In Marshall Field’s she will have eyes for baby clothes and bassinets. She will bring home with her (written in her little spiral pad purchased for just this purpose) a list of what they will have to buy (page one); what they might have to buy (page two); and (pages three and four) what it would be oh so nice to have, Paul, if and when we can afford it. One short month, darling, and we’ll have our little Nahum. Our comfort.


  Doris set a tray down on the coffee table in front of the couch; Paul noticed that she had applied lipstick and eye shadow in the kitchen. The tray settled, Doris reached behind her and lowered the pulley lamp that extended from the wall. She tugged at it without even looking, and the carelessness, the at-homeness, of her movement had its effect upon him. It led him to believe that she was very happy. She was wearing little black sequined house slippers and they too somehow encouraged him to believe that she was happy. “Do you like French crescents?” she asked. “You get them ready-made and you just warm them. In the oven, and that’s it.”

  “They look very good.”

  “Maury likes anything European.”

  “Maury was always a bon vivant,” he mumbled.

  “Are you being sarcastic?” she asked. “Cause you were always sarcastic, Paul. I mean you could always cut somebody if you made up your mind to. The intellectual,” she said. “You even look the same, really.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Doris. Except I’ve lost half my hair.”

  “Oh,” she said kindly, “not half.” Yes, the same cuddly Doris. All right, dolly, let the young man open the door for himself and let us hear his footsteps lightly down the hallway, what do you say, young man—

  “I’ll bet Maury’s got every strand.”